Balancing
Acts
by
Howard Schumann
On the overcast morning of August 7, 1974, one day before
President Richard Nixon resigned, New York City pedestrians stopped
in their tracks to see what looked like an appartiton, a man literally
walking in the sky. It was not a ghost but Philippe Petit, a former
circus performer turned tightrope artist who magically traversed the
200 feet between the newly constructed twin towers of the World Trade
Center on a wire cable, a quarter of a mile above the street. Not only
did he walk across eight times in forty five minutes but he lay down
in the middle, unbelievably looked to the ground, and did a mocking
dance to entertain the police waiting on either end.
For those
watching, it was a once in a lifetime experience, an activity thought
of as belonging to circus performers or publicity seekers turned into
a feat of artisitic beauty. That achievement has now been documented
in James Marsh’s award winning Man on Wire,
a compelling film beautifully enhanced by the music of Michael Nyman
and Erik Satie. Marsh uses interviews, photos, archive footage, and
black and white re-enactments to capture the event. Though we know that
Petit survives, the thrill of seeing the feat accomplished is still
breathtaking. Petit describes his feelings as "feeling intensely
living." "I remember hearing, smelling, touching," he
says, "seeing in a much more animal way. I could hear New York
waking up, the traffic and the sirens, the mutter of a big city. I also
could hear a strange kind of silence coming from another planet."
Starting
out as a circus performer, Petit captured the world’s imagination
when he walked across the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and
the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He had not even heard of the construction
of the twin towers until he saw an architect’s drawing in a magazine
while sitting in a dentist’s office. It was then that the idea
of crossing the towers became his dream. Petit, who at age 59, looks
every bit as pixie-ish as he did at 24, tells us how his “walk”
between the towers came about. “I thought,” he said, "this
is it. At one point in my life, I'm going to transform the negative
space between those two monoliths into the most magnificent theater."
To this end, Petit assembled a team of assistants that consisted of
a mixed group of New Yorkers, Frenchmen, and Australians (Allix, Jean-Louis
Blondeau, Jean-François Heckel, and Mark Lewis), and spent eight
months planning the event.
The plan
included the herculean task of smuggling a three-quarter-inch steel
cable that weighs about 450 pounds, placing it into position, and securing
it in an area 1350 feet from the ground without being stopped by security
guards. The building was basically finished but the upper floor was
still incomplete and Petit and his crew had to disguise themselves as
journalists, filmmakers, and WTC workers in order to enter the building
and elude the authorities. According to Petit, “The actual plan
was simple. I entered the tower at night with two crews. The plan changed
a lot, and it was a festival of miracles that night as I recall it,
but anyway, it did happen.” After threatening to pull him off
the wire by helicopter, the police persuaded Petit to end his performance,
and he was promptly arrested by New York’s finest for “disturbing
the peace” and “performing in public without a license,”
but was finally sentenced to put on a public performance for children
after he had become a cause célèbre.
The police,
however, like the rest of the spectators, could not conceal their amazement.
One of the officers reported, “I observed the tightrope 'dancer'
-- because you couldn't call him a 'walker' -- approximately halfway
between the two towers. And upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh
and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire. And when
he got to the building we asked him to get off the high wire but instead
he turned around and ran back out into the middle. He was bouncing up
and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would
resettle back on the wire again. Unbelievable, really. Everybody was
spellbound in the watching of it." You will be spellbound as well.
Metaphors
about food and its connection to life are common in our society: for
example, “life is just a bowl of cherries." Yet many of us
take food for granted, treating it as little more than a necessary means
of survival, pausing only long enough to open a package or stop for
fast food on the way home from work. The connection between our life
and what we eat is the main theme of German director Dorris Dorrie’s
documentary How to Cook Your Life featuring
Zen practitioner and acclaimed chef Edward Espe Brown. Brown has been
a practicing Buddhist for over forty years and is the author of several
books including The Tassajara Bread Book, a main reference
for aspiring bread bakers.
Winner of
the Audience Award at Sundance, Dorrie’s film follows Brown to
several Buddhist centers including Scheibbs in Austria, the Tassajara
Zen Mountain Center, and the Zen Center in San Francisco as he promotes
his ideas about our putting food into a larger context in our life.
"When you're cooking you're not just cooking,” he says, “not
just working on food, you are also working on yourself, on other people."
Brown was ordained as a Zen priest in 1971 by Suzuki Roshi and has held
cooking classes in Buddhist centers throughout the world, teaching mindful
awareness of food in our life. Roshi, author of the popular Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind, is shown in original archive footage:
"When you wash the rice,” he once told Brown, “wash
the rice, when you cut the carrots, cut the carrots, when you stir the
soup, stir the soup." In other words, when you are involved with
a task, be involved one hundred percent, stay in present time and silence
the little voice in the back of your head.
Dorrie divides the film into sections: free your hands, fiasco, cutting
through the confusion, anger, affluence, no preferences-no aversions,
incomparable, imperfection and blemishes. She also visits an organic
farm and a cookware store and shows how a woman creates her own meals
by scavenging fruit from trees and leftovers from grocery stores.
Brown
aches for a return to a simpler life with a more personal involvement
with food. His emphasis is on the joy of using our hands in cooking,
and he has nothing good to say about the packaged and processed foods
that permeate our society. He talks with nostalgia about his memories
of when his father baked his own bread. "Why are we eating like
this? What went wrong? We're eating a puffy kind of chemically, not
very tasty, papery-cardboard bread. We don't do things anymore because
supposedly machines can do it better.”
Brown has
a strong point of view and has the ability to laugh at himself with
a little chuckle like the Dalai Lama, though at times his personality
can be somewhat irritating, and I would have enjoyed hearing from more
of the participants at the Centers. Dorrie does not set him up as a
saint, however, showing his occasional lapses into anger and frustration
and his tears when describing a dented teakettle and comparing it to
the worn vessel of our own bodies. The message, however, comes through
clearly. Brown says, “When we give away our capacity to do things
with our hands, with our bodies, to use our hands to knead the bread,
to make things, to touch things, to smell things, how are we going to
feel alive?" I remembered this the next day when I made pancakes
from scratch for the first time in many years. Not bad, either.
©2008 Howard Schumann
CineScene
